Heading to SanFran March 21-25

Posted on February 24, 2007 by Thomas Purves

Thanks to some friendly suggestion on our behalf, Jevon and I have been offered a spot on the roster at the Under the Radar Conference on the 23rd of March [upcoming.org]. We’ll be showing off the Firestoker project as it currently stands in development (and it’s starting to develop nicely). Secondly, if we can finagle ourselves an invite again, I’m also hoping we’ll make it to the STIRR mixer on the 21st [upcoming]

So I’ll be in the bay area March 21st to 25th, if you are, or will be, down there during that time and would like to meetup, let me know!

UPDATE: Oops! forgot I need to be back on the east coast on the 24th. (thank you Orbitz/AirCanada/United for 24hr ticket cancellation option). I’ll be in the bay area March 21st to the 23rd and a (shall for now be kept secret) East Coast location the 24th and 25th of March.

Posted in Archive, Business, Personal | Leave a comment

Skype’s legal action and a ray of hope for open cellular networks

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Thomas Purves

According to Ars Technica today Skype asks FCC to open up cellular networks, Skype is trying to force the FTC in the US to uphold many decades-old principle that allows consumers to ” hook any device up to the phone network, so long as it did not harm the network”. A favorable decision for Skype could one day have enormous value for consumers letting them compete on the application layer for what services they want to use to make calls, transfer data or run applications etc. Currently however, carriers have this nasty habit of blocking Skype and anything else that might eat into their tasty margins on data traffic and $3 ring tones, and crusty closed-loop music services etc.

This would also be good news for Canadians as (eventually) the CRTC would have to follow suit. (hey it only took our faithful regulators half a decade to catch up to the US on number portability).

Canada badly needs more competition in the mobile space. (even if shareholders of Rogers, Bell and Telus may be inclined to disagree)

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The GoogleOS Will Have to Wait

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Thomas Purves

because today Google is going after Microsoft’s other cash cow, the office suite. The Inquirer deadpans (you have to love the Inquirer):

A SEARCH ENGINE FIRM called Google has released its first product which could challenge Microsoft in its own manor.

The big idea is to get corporations to subscribe to its online corporate software bundle which includes office software over the interweb.

Google Apps Premier Edition, which was released today, has an online e-mail, calendaring, messaging and talk applications as well as a word processor and a spreadsheet.

Unlike the free version – which has been ignored by the great unwashed public for a while – the Premier Edition has a few bells and whistles that make it more useful for medium and larger sized businesses.

They’re charging $50 for it, which is a bargain considering the full MS desktop office suite costs 10 times that amount. Google’s online suite doesn’t do a lot of things that the desktop one does, but it does do many of the most important things that people might want to do with a document/mail/calendar suite and a bunch of other nifty things besides, by virtue of being web-based. (integration with Gmail/gtalk buddylist and simultaneous online document collaboration is really cool.)

That said, there’s no online-analog yet for PowerPoint. This is a touchy subject, as for better or worse, I’ve seen that PowerPoint is replacing Microsoft Word is the main internal document format for many large organizations.

While I don’t have a copy of it yet myself (Microsoft… anyone?), they tell me the latest version of MS Office(2007) is indeed very nice… For desktop software.

Here’s how we’ll know when the first online or other new office suite has really made it: when there is a price crossover with Microsoft Office. For the time being, some combination of either actual or perceived difference in value between MSOffice and Google’s offering is still allowing Microsoft command a 10x price premium.

How much longer will that last?

Link: Google releases online business software – The Inq

Posted in Archive, Business | 4 Comments